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New DisplayPort 1.4 Standard Can Drive 8K Monitors Over A USB Type-C Cable (arstechnica.com)
AmiMoJo writes: VESA has finalized and released the DisplayPort 1.4 spec, which can drive 60Hz 8K displays and supports HDR color modes at 5K and 8K. The physical interface used to carry DisplayPort data -- High Bit Rate 3 (HBR3), which provides 8.1Gbps of bandwidth per lane -- is still the same as it was in DisplayPort 1.3. The new standard drives higher-resolution displays with better color support using Display Stream Compression (DSC), a "visually lossless" form of compression that VESA says "enables up to [a] 3:1 compression ratio." This data compression, among other things, allows DisplayPort 1.4 to drive 60Hz 8K displays and 120Hz 4K displays with HDR "deep color" over both DisplayPort and USB Type-C cables. USB Type-C cables can provide a USB 3.0 data connection, too.
I have to say that I'm more excited about 4k at 120hz than 8k at 60hz, but it is all an improvement.
As it stands now, 4k displays are wonderful for work, I am typing this on my office computer which has a pair of Acer 32" 4k displays on it.
Acer 32" 4K IPS display
http://amzn.to/1poiivZ
They are beautiful monitors. Not perfect color and I wouldn't suggest them if 100% color accuracy is your goal, but for general business use, they are just about the perfect combination of size and resolution. My home machine runs a trio of Dell 30" 1600p monitors, and while they are nice for gaming, I can tell the difference between a 30" 1600p monitor and a 32" 4k monitor when it comes to text in Windows. Almost all "jaggies" are gone at 4k, the text is the closest I've ever seen a monitor to get to "paper" look. The 30" 1600p monitors still show "jaggies" in Windows text.
Now for gaming, they aren't quite there yet. Between the slower response time of IPS and the inability to get decent GPU performance, 4k is a rough experience. I tried several games and I found that while they are beautiful, the limit is the GPU power.
I did try only a single GPU (GTX 980 TI), I imagine a dual SLI GPU configuration would be better, but I didn't have a second 980 TI to try that out with. 8k will be awhile in terms of gaming, if due to lack of GPU power if anything else.
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TL;DR - 120hz should be the new standard, it will reduce eyestrain and open up options for gaming and movies that don't exist at 60hz, while the HDR improvements will also be wonderful. I'm not convinced that 8k will show up any time soon or even be needed, but time will tell on that one.
No, most digital display connectors use some sort of compression already (bandwidth constraints and all that). The point is that you can cram a whole lot more digital information down the pipe than you can analogue with cheaper equipment. More information == better picture, even if you do have still have some loss.
(the more devious point of digital display connection is to block the so-called analogue hole)
Erm 320kbps MP3's ARE audibly lossless.
They aren't actually lossless but no one can ever tell the difference in a proper double blind study.
I thought the same thing until I read an article by David Newman, an engineer for Cineform. He personally defined visually lossless as "when the compression error falls well below the inherent noise floor of the imaging device" (Visually Lossless and how to back it up).
He says, more or less, that if you set a camera on a tripod and shoot a still life of, say, a bowl of fruit, there still will be a difference from one frame to the next in the video, even in a totally uncompressed signal. This can mainly be blamed on noise in the image sensor. All sensors have a noise floor. So first you measure what that noise is. Then you measure how much degradation a certain compression introduces. If the difference between the uncompressed and compressed signal is less than or equal to the difference between uncompressed frames, then you might call the codec visually lossless.
Actually he takes it one step further. He averaged 72 frames of the stationary object to mostly remove the noise even from the image sensor. He then saw whether the compressed image differed from this "golden frame" by more than any given uncompressed frame differed from it.
Yes, yes, yes, there's no telling what standard VESA used, but at this point I think visually lossless can have some meaning. Usually, in fact, video that's called visually lossless is very, very good and can only be discerned at much closer-than-average viewing distances and often with various image enhancements to bring out the noise. In normal viewing conditions, most video professionals, and certainly even more consumers, cannot tell the diffference between the original and any of the codecs that tout themselves (scientifically or otherwise) as visually lossless.